Women and Children First

It had already been a long voyage. For almost two full days, the little steamer Marion had lain at anchor at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, waiting for the weather to clear. Winter rain spattered against the decks and landed, hissing, on the boilers’ iron flanks. Below, several dozen unhappy passengers huddled in the dimness, mothers consoling their wailing children or staggering over to the portholes to be sick.

But on Feb. 3 they had emerged resolutely above decks, despite the weather, as the steamer passed the high walls of the fortress where they were leaving behind their loved ones. There, silhouetted against the gray sky, were Fort Sumter’s defenders, their husbands and fathers. From atop the parapet of Sumter came three rounds of throaty cheers. The women and children, many choking back tears, bravely shouted three cheers in reply.

Then the boat chugged on and Sumter, out of earshot, dropped away astern. “The men lingered upon the parapet until the vessel was lost to view on the horizon,” an officer wrote. The wives and children of the Union garrison’s enlisted men were headed away from secession and revolution, away from impending war, toward safety in New York.

The role of women in the Civil War began much sooner — and much more dramatically — than most later accounts suggest. At Fort Sumter, wives and children suffered the fears, privations and hard work of the siege for more than a month, alongside the small force of officers and men under Maj. Robert Anderson. They were even on the battlements when the first shots of the war were fired — and came close to participating in the combat themselves.

In the prewar Army, it was commonplace for the fighting men’s wives and children to accompany them from one posting to another. Few first-hand accounts survive, though, perhaps because common soldiers were almost always poor, and usually immigrants, and it is likely that many of them and their spouses were illiterate. Still, we know a good amount about the lives of the women and their families during those months at Fort Sumter.

By late January supplies were running short; the privates had been put on half-rations, while their officers — though not deprived to the same degree — were going without coffee. And the warlike preparations around them grew more and more ominous: the rebels sank hulks in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, while slaves constructed a formidable-looking, bombproof battery at the tip of Morris Island.

Moreover, some of the besieged families at Sumter apparently had reason to feel anxious not just for themselves, but also for the besiegers. One of the Union corporals had a son among the Confederates on Morris Island, while a soldier’s brother had enlisted in the secessionist Palmetto Guard. “If war comes,” The Times’s correspondent wrote presciently, “a father may point at the heart of a son, and brother may meet brother in deadly conflict!”

Library of CongressMary and Abner Doubleday

As for the officers’ families, most had already been separated from their loved ones for over a month. In late December, just before withdrawing into Sumter from their original post at Fort Moultrie, the officers had sent their wives and children over to the mainland, seemingly out of harm’s way. Mary Doubleday, the wife of Capt. Abner Doubleday, had taken hasty leave of her husband, with barely enough time to throw her clothing into a couple of trunks before embracing him sadly — for, as her husband later recalled, “neither knew when or where we would meet again.” She spent that long night pacing up and down the beach, peering anxiously toward Sumter.

Mrs. Doubleday was not one to be kept apart from her husband for long, however. On the afternoon of Jan. 3, she surprised Abner by appearing at Sumter’s wharf, bundled up against the intense cold, perched in the stern of a longboat rowed by some civilian laborers returning to the fort. (For the time being, at least, South Carolina’s authorities had decided not to interfere with these workmen’s comings and goings.) Two other officers’ wives managed to come over separately that day. Captain Doubleday was delighted, but also somewhat nonplussed: in the harsh conditions of the beleaguered fort, with lamp oil and fuel already almost depleted, the ladies could hardly be entertained in the comfort to which they were accustomed. Gallantly, he chopped up a handsome mahogany table in his quarters, burning it for fuel “to keep my wife from suffering during her brief visit.”

According to an account that emerged weeks later in The Times and other newspapers, Mrs. Doubleday and Louisa Weir Seymour, the wife of Capt. Truman Seymour, repaid such hospitality by smuggling over “a number of articles, including a box of candles, intended for the use of their friends in the garrison.” (The report denied rumors that the ladies had indelicately concealed this precious contraband under their hoop skirts, however.)

Mrs. Seymour, who came from a prominent family of American painters, was as redoubtable a character as Mrs. Doubleday. While at Sumter, she reportedly begged Major Anderson for permission to stay and help load cannons or care for the wounded when the inevitable assault on Sumter came. “The request was, for reasons which were to the Major manifest, respectfully denied,” a letter in The Times reported.

Despite this refusal, at least one of the women did nearly experience combat – indeed, she very nearly fired a shot that could have touched off the Civil War three months early. On Jan. 9, one officer’s wife — her identity was not recorded — was present with the Union troops on the ramparts when they watched, helpless, as Confederate gunners lobbed cannonballs at the steamer Star of the West, which was unsuccessfully attempting to bring provisions and reinforcement. Less willing than the men to suffer this assault without retaliating, she seized the lanyard of a loaded cannon, intending to fire back at the rebel battery. The quick-thinking Doubleday stayed her hand.

Even after they left Sumter, Mrs. Doubleday and the other officers’ wives continued to fight on the garrison’s behalf. They went immediately to Washington, where they funneled information about the besieged garrison to President James Buchanan and to President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

As for Major Anderson’s wife, she, too, played a role in the armed standoff. Eba Anderson, who suffered chronic ill-health, had remained behind in New York when her husband took over command in Charleston Harbor. But one day in January, the mail boat from Charleston to Sumter dropped her off unexpectedly at the fort’s wharf. Worried by the lack of mail from her husband, the major’s Georgia-born wife had traveled by train from New York to see him, and received permission from the rebel authorities because, as Doubleday wryly put it, “she had many influential relatives among the Secessionists.”

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Eba Anderson stayed only two hours — barely long enough to assure herself that her husband was safe and to take a meal together — but with her had come another visitor who would remain for three months. Peter Hart, a tough former sergeant, had accompanied the major as his orderly all through the Mexican War. Remembering her husband’s fondness for him, the resourceful Mrs. Anderson had decided to track him down. She found Hart serving as a New York City policeman in a remote district of Upper Manhattan — just above 26th Street, that is — and somehow persuaded him to join the defenders at Sumter. The rebels refused at first to let Hart stay, but when Mrs. Anderson persisted, they gave in, on the condition of his word of honor not to fight as a soldier. This he gave, but he would still play an important role in the battle to come.

On Feb. 6, the steamer Marion at last drew up to a wharf in New York Harbor. Newspaper correspondents were waiting to interview the enlisted men’s wives as they disembarked. A Times reporter wrote:

With few exceptions, they appeared in good spirits, and some of them even in cheerful humor, and were not at all inclined to put a bad face upon affairs in Sumter. The more intelligent and thoughtful among them, however, appeared anxious and care-worn. They had taken leave of their husbands with heavy hearts and might never see them again. … Great anxiety was evinced by them to know the course events were likely to take, and the most earnest wishes were expressed that affairs might be peaceably settled, and without bloodshed.

Sources: Abner Doubleday, “Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-’61”; Samuel Wylie Crawford, “The History of the Fall of Fort Sumpter”; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Vol. 1; Edward M. Coffmann, “The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898”; New York Times, Jan. 15, 19, 28, 30, 1861 and Feb. 2, 7, 8, 16, 18, 25, 1861.

Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.